Dharma, a Coinbase-backed peer-to-peer lending platform, on Thursday, announced the launch of a new version of its platform with a new savings product.
With this, the company is slowly pivoting from its existing crypto lending services and focusing more on the newly launched product.
For the new platform, the San Francisco-based company has partnered with the Ethereum-based money market Compound and will use its protocol as infrastructure, per the official blog post.
For now, the new platform is in a closed beta stage, and only the company’s previous clients can access it. However, it has plans to open up the beta stage within weeks for further testing.
Dharma also detailed that the new version will make its smart contracts open source prior to the release of the production stage.
A decision based on statistics
The Coinbase-backed company’s plan to pivot from its older business plan is justified as it has seen a significant decrease in the issued loans recently - $6.9 million in loans last April went down to $1 million in June, per the data from Loanscan. Although the firm recorded an uptick in the following month, on August 7, it suspended new deposits and loans on its platform.
Compound, on the other hand, is thriving as the originations on the platform increased from $12 million in May to $43 million in July.
Although the new platform will only offer to lend initially, it will also provide lending and borrowing services at fixed interests based on Compound’s Liquidity pool. With “instant matching,” the lenders of the platform will immediately earn interests on the deposits.
“When we launched Dharma V1 to the public in April, we announced our aspiration to become the easiest place to borrow and lend Cryptocurrencies ,” the official blog stated.
“[Now] we set our sights on a new, audacious mission: to build the first internet-native, borderless bank — so that everyone, everywhere has the tools to prosper.”
